In order to enable software written using CHICKEN to be effectively distributed, it is important that CHICKEN (or at least the CHICKEN libraries) be included in as many of the various packaging systems as possible, so that it can always be relied on as an available dependency.

Linux

Arch Linux

Arch users can install CHICKEN (currently the older 4.5.0, but 4.6.0 could be easily built via ABS) from its official community repository:

Installing the readline egg

However, you may get errors when compiling the egg. This is because Apple doesn't ship GNU readline with OS X. However, there is an easy fix:

port install readline

Fixing libchicken.dylib

When using certain extensions (posix is one example), you may come across the following error:

"dlopen(libchicken.dylib, 9): image not found"

The easiest way to fix this is to add an alias to libchicken.dylib to /usr/local/lib, like so:

sudo ln -s /opt/local/lib/libchicken.dylib /usr/local/lib/

Another solution is to set the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to the location of libchicken.dylib. However, this will mess up some other programs, as they will look for their libraries in /opt/local/lib as well. One solution is to set up aliases for csi and csc in your bash profile. Add the following two lines to ~/.profile:

This will set DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH for csi and csc, but not for other commands.

BSD

FreeBSD

For FreeBSD, you can use the lang/chicken port to install the latest stable release.

NetBSD

For NetBSD, you can use the lang/chicken package from pkgsrc to install the latest stable release.

OpenBSD

For OpenBSD, you can use the lang/chicken package by running the following command as root:

$ pkg_add chicken

DragonFly BSD

For DragonFly BSD, you can use the lang/chicken package from pkgsrc to install the latest stable release.

Haiku

HaikuPorts

Chicken has been added to the official ports repository and can be installed with the following command:

haikuporter -i chicken

Other platforms/cross-platform support

pkgsrc

For many systems, you can use pkgsrc. This is a cross-platform packaging system, which works most modern Unix-like operating systems and even on Windows (using Interix/Services for Unix or Cygwin). See this table for the full list of supported platforms.